Scraptaphagos, they are going to have to learn to do something else; they may need help and they should get it. As I have advised before in different threads here, there is no shortage of new ideas that would create new jobs, there is only a misapplication of capital and a repression of innovation and entrepreneurship created by our present government policies. Is not better that in China when a truck comes to deliver materials to a factory that the factory workers stop what they are doing and form a line to manually offload the truck into the inventory storage, a human chain passing bags and boxes; where in the U.S., the materials are down loaded by one guy with a fork lift while everyone else goes about thier business. If you don't apply capital to labor then laborers can never increase thier wages. If you don't see real capital, as something that includes your personal skill set and your intellectual capacity then you will never increase your wages. The idea that capital applied to making labor more productive destroys labor is a completely stupid formulation. You have to assume that people are dump as bricks and will never learn, adapt or become trainable. We need to protect the jobs of buggy whip makers, ditch diggers and cotton pickers? You should want to create new jobs that are based on capital investment and requires people to learn skills...that is how you help the worker. What you imply, in the name of protecting present dead end jobs and the expense of creating no future jobs, is a formula for no growth wage slave government dependency on a government that will go broke.
as is now when republicans start to believe that your money should go to the public sector, the US will continue in its inexorable decline. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/26/3202395/state-budget-surplus-will-spur.html
India is not surpassing the USA in total GDP. Bangladesh with 1/2 the population of the USA does not have 1/2 our GDP, same with Nigeria and Pakistan.
I implied no such thing. You're a smart guy.. but suggest you leave mind-reading to Miss Chloe. My view is (1) there are too many people on the planet for everyone to have a well-paying, skilled job who wants one. (2) Technology/productivity only makes the matter worse. Sure, "they are going to have to learn to do something else"... I doubt there is enough of "something else" for everybody to find a happy, well-paying spot in it. Even China's Foxconn says they are planning to have robots replace 1 million workers... workers who make what, $1/hr? Is China going to find replacement jobs for those 1 million?
Scataphagos, sorry about the spelling, I write quick, spelling not my strong suit, no offense intended. Issue of mind reading...I don't pretend to read your mind; I wrote what I thought was 'implied' as a consequence of your luddite formulation. I got it from your words, from what you wrote. Here again in this response you state it more clearly...labor saving technology dooms a oversupply of unskilled labor. I disagree. Work expands with people's imaginations. There is not a limitted amount of work. More people make more work. There is no solution to anything if you ban the Backhoe and make the Chineese workers dig... just to pretend they have something useful to do. There has always been more people than what appeared to the present 'work'. Human aspiration, human imagination, the innate urge to grow that we are born with, is enough to make work expand. Technology frees people from doing work that cannot pay them enough to keep doing it; that they don't need to do. It solves an old problem in a better way so that you can then turn to a new problem. There is always something else; we will never run out of problems like will never run out of dreams. Lets face it, the buggy whip makers found other work; the farm laborers of the 19th century found other work, the cotton pickers found other work...you can see it aqain and again in economic human history. The issue is really whether anything can actually be done to help with the dislocation, the transition and the impact on real people who are not prepared to do something else. Work comes from Ideas. People have Ideas. There is no shortage fo ideas to make work....you don't have to keep digging holes by hand just because you can't think of something else to do right away. As technology reduces the unskilled labor needed to make things and move things it will create new opportunities to do something else. When you don't have to work all day to grow, can, cook and store your own food, make your own tools, repair and maintain your own house...then you can do something else. There was a time when there was no such thing as a viable liesure industry outside a very small aristocratic class. Consider the economic as well as the human impact of a society that is moving up Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs." What do you propose? Limit the number of people allowed? Laws that make application of labor saving technology impossible? Then laws that protect the obsolete industries? Then laws that mandate a level of wage and put a cap on the level of profit? Then a rising tax rate as income declines? Socialization of these now non competitive industries? And of course an overarching Government with expanded powers of coercion and subjugation of individual liberty in order to make these laws stick. Soon, we will all be working in a 20th century Polish Steel Mill! Like I said above, it implies wage slaves and dependents. What happened to the excess Polish Steel workers? The biggest problem with the modern 'unskilled' workforce is that they have been so poorly served by our puplic education system...intellectually, culturally and civically. They have not been prepared to find anything else to do...they have not been prepared to do anything; they need someone else to help them fill out the forms for entitlements.
Disagree with your disagreement. We've got "10s of millions" drawing subsidies in US... If we had a productive "place for them to go/work", we'd be utilizing it now. It's theoretically "nice" to say "all we gotta do is innovate or find a place for the unskilled and displaced"... I say, "there ain't no place for all who need/want it... if there were, we'd be utilizing it." And, there is constant pressure to replace "all that can be displaced with technology/productivity". I think there are about 4 Billion more people on the planet than Earth can happily and productively support... hence, a problem with no solution... other than population culling. (Sounds harsh, I know. But the standard of living increased for survivors of Europe's great plague.)
We could eliminate that Corporate Tax and raise the tax on dividends to the regular income rates...to attract capital to labor in the U.S. without losing any revenue...actually increasing revenue...and pass a flat regular income tax....then all the tax lawyers made obsolete could get to work on the obstacles you say are insurmountable. If you simply just made the U.S. the best place in the world to invest again you would use up all that excess labor and you would have to start a guest worker program to address the labor shortage...and this doesn't take a lot of imagination at all....its just 'Stop bing Stupid.' I disagree with you small earth limits. Production of the necessities of life to support life on the planet have continued to expand...becasue the new people work and imagine to exapand the necessities. There is plenty of food produced to feed the planet....starvation is a political economic brakedown; there is enough production, enough land, enough energy, enough water, enough metal, and the technologies to expand the supply of necessities so that the planet can continue to support all the people on it. I beleve this was well settled by the late Julian Simon a long time ago. You don't have to kill people.
1. What you suggest would have big impact on "excess labor" in the US... at the expense of other countries.... which would be OK by me. There are only so many well-paying jobs in the entire world... not enough for everyone who desires one... I'd rather America have the best of whatever it can provide for our citizens. 2. Where you gonna find "Stop Being Stupid" in Washington DC? They are INTENTIONALLY BEING MORE AND MORE STUPID BY THE DAY... all for political power objectives.
The rest of the world is not devoid of imagination...it really operates at the level of the individual anyway. The rest of the world, except the U.S., has been able to see what works and make adjustments. Certainly, if the U.S. moved to become the most attractive place to invest capital in production, other countries in the world would adjust...to a wider befefit...they would have to. There are enough ideas to make jobs everywhere, which is what an increased world growth rate would be all about. On 'Stupid'...you are right...that is why its not happenning and why we are having this discussion about a luddite no growth paradigm reaction.